User Guide

This guide is here to familarize you with the features and usage of your SCS account.

Your SCS account gives you access to our computational resources, an SCS email account, access to SCS wireless, and access to the VizLab.

If you are unfamiliar with the UNIX operating system and want some more information about it, there is a well-maintained and comprehensive UNIX FAQ available at faqs.org.

Account Charges

There is no flat fee for your SCS account, and no usage quotas. However, all disk space is billed to a University account number that is associated with your account. Please see the Rates page for our current billing rates.

Login Information and Remote Display

Logging In

To log in to our systems with your SCS account, use will need an SSH client. On Linux and OS X, this is available via the 'ssh' command in a terminal. For Windows, we recommend using PuTTY to connect. Note that many systems (including VizLab machines and Triton) are behind the campus firewall, so if you need to connect from off-campus, you will need to use a VPN client.

Remote Display

In order to run graphical programs remotely, you need to be running an X11 Server on your computer, and then use ssh to tunnel the X11 connections back to your machine.

For Linux, you can tunnel the display when you connect to a remote machine. Use the -Y option to ssh, for example, ssh -Y username [at] machine [dot] scs [dot] uiuc [dot] edu.

For OS X, you need to have X11.app installed. Starting in OSX 10.5 and later, it will launch on demand. For older versions, start X11 first and then connect in the same manner as from Linux.

For Windows, you need to have an X server running and enable the forwarding in PuTTY before connecting. It is under Connection > SSH > X11. Check the box labelled "Enable X11 Forwarding".

Cygwin/X: Freely available, but more difficult to use if not already familiair with unix and Cygwin.

Xming: Easy to install and use, and also free. Slighltly out of date for the public release. Make sure to download and install both the xming-mesa and xming-fonts packages.

Scientific Computing

One of the primary services available with your SCS account is scientific software and computer time for scientific computing. We have a large number of software packages available both in the VizLab and on the Chemistry Cluster, Triton.